How funding apartheid fails young library users

Lack of funds prevent provinces from carrying out their mandate to manage public library services

- Gcina Ntsaluba and Rod Amner

When Grade 11 learner Sipho Mthembu arrives at Duna Library, his local facility in Joza, Makhanda, on Monday afternoons, he's not looking for books to borrow. Like thousands of learners across South Africa's poorer provinces, he needs something more basic: a quiet place to study with working electricity - luxuries his home doesn't provide.

Yet the library closes at 5pm, soon after school ends.

The few computers lack educational resources. There are no CAPS (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement) -aligned study guides and other educational resources, and no weekend hours when he's most free to study.

Two kilometres away in Fingo Village, the library has been closed since 2022, after the collapse of its roof. A contract to renovate and upgrade the library was scuppered this year, postponing the completion for at least another few years.

A Rhodes University journalism student seeking to join Makhanda's main library was turned away for three months this year due to a broken card laminating machine.

After she wrote a news story about the debacle in the local newspaper, a new laminator was hastily acquired.

In the Western Cape, some libraries stay open until 8pm, offer coding classes and run homework clubs staffed by trained tutors.

Library users can download from a huge range of digital books and audiobooks on the province's Libby app.

Cecilia Sani, the deputy director-general for library services in the Western Cape, took her daughter to a public library for the first time when she was four years old. "She asked me with such excitement, 'Can we take any book for free?' And when I told her she could take more than one book, she was over the moon."

"The most exciting part of a new library opening is seeing the spark in children's eyes when they walk in for the first time. Many come from homes without books, so to them a library represents a new world of imagination, possibility and hope," Sani says.